Oh, a keyboard, how quaint.We solved this problem with voice recognition software some years ago. The trouble is, we can't tell if the person is addressing the computer, or is simply talking about a computer. For example:

"Computer run a level 3 diagnostic on the transporter assembly"...would trigger the computer to run a level 3 diagnostic on the transporter assembly.

or

"Damn machines, I did not tell my computer to self destruct."...would trigger the computer to initiate the self-destruct mechanism. Kaboom.

Hopefully this problem will be fixed before Zefram Cochrane [startrek.com] takes off in a few years.

A more likely reason for the confusion is that Russian has several sounds which English does not.

I think you meant English has several sounds not present in Russian, based upon the example given.

Russian has no consonants to depict the sounds presented by the English letters "j", "qu", "x" and "w". English does in fact have the "zh" sounds. It's just not represented by a single letter. Pronounce "vision".

Just goes to show how many ideas mentioned in StarTrek actually come about. I guess we still have to work on that warp drive, dilithium crystal regeneration and photon torpedoes...and replicators. "Earl Gray. Hot."

You would think with all that technology, and thousands of terrabytes of hard drive space that the retarded ass computer would remember Picards drink. He always gets his Earl Gray hot!. If I was him I would say "Give me my damn tea you stupid excuse for a computer. Hell even Windows remembers my preferences!":)

7) Jokes usually need a grain of truth or a plausible premise in order to be funny.

e.g. "3 girls jumped off a building. Which one hits last? The one who stopped to ask for directions!"

That's not funny because it's a ridiculous situation with no roots in reality. On the other hand,

"A Blonde, a Brunette, and a Red Head all jump off a building. Which one hits last? The Blond! She had to stop and ask for directions!"

That is funny because the premise for the joke is a commonly held belief that blonds are dumb. Of course, such suppositions are often flawed and allow for an equally amusing joke that makes the exact counter point:

"So a Blond walks into a bank and asks for a two week loan of $10,000. Dubious of the Blond's motives, the bank manager asks for collateral. The Blond replies that she could always put her Mercedes up as collateral, since it was worth far more than her loan. The bank manager agrees, and drives her car into the bank garage after loaning her the money.

"In two weeks the Blonde returns with the $10,000, plus the $5.00 interest on the loan. As the manager returns the keys to her car, he asks, 'I did some checking while you were away. It seems you're loaded with money! Why did you need a loan for two weeks?' To which the Blonde replies, 'Where else in New York can I park my car for two weeks and only pay $5.00!'"

If I remember correctly, they did not need the clear aluminum but they did need something to store the whale in. Since they did not have any money they traded the formula for clear aluminum for the whale tank.

Even weirder, back in the early 1900's, a man named Harold Warp (Now somewhat famous for starting a huge museum called Pioneer Village [pioneervillage.com] in the middle of Nebraska) invented a way of heat bending of plastic glass (Called Flex-O-Glass. The more commonly known 'Plexiglass' is a copy by a later competitor once the patent expired.) that retained its optical properties. This process became known as "Warping [warpbros.com]". At about the same time, mathmaticians were stumbling across the basics of the time-space continuum, and borrowed the term to refer to bending time/space.

The main street in Minden, Nebraska has now been renamed from "Brown Avenue" to "Harold Warp Memorial Drive" (Which most people refer to now as "Warp Drive"). A friend of mine lives on Warp Drive, which is kinda cool to a geek like me.

So they did the original creator of "Warping" a disservice when they wanted to obtain Plexiglass instead of Flex-O-Glass.

Not quite true. Harold Warp did invent Flex-O-Glass, and there is a Harold Warp Memorial Drive. But his last name is a coincidence. Warp has meant to twist or bend something for hundreds of years. It originates from the old english word "weorpan". In 1346 it was used as a weaving term. (When weaving, you start with lengthwise threads, the "Warp" and weave the "Woof" perpendicularly across it). In 1440 the word Warp was first recorded as meaning to twist out of shape.

This is not the only coincidental last name. I'm sure many are familar with the inventor of the ball and suction device, still used in toilets today. His name was Thomas Crapper, but "crap", meaning defication, had been slang for at least 50 years before he invented the toilet. And it has meant general refuse for a great deal longer than that. The sirname Crapper originats in the 13th century, and is a variation of "Cropper", an occupation sirname, like Cartwright, Smith, and so on.

You're partially correct. They needed something *light* and *strong* to compensate for the mass of the whales and water. Transparent aluminum was the only material that would satisfy those requirements. I think they said that to use steel or glass, the tank walls would have been far too thick.

Scotty and McCoy went to a plant that manufactored plexiglass because plexiglass was strong enough to hold the water and whales they needed if it were thick enough. (There's one part of the movie where Scotty calculates how thick the plexiglass needs to be to finish building their tank.) Since they had no money, they couldn't pay for the plexiglass needed so instead Scotty drew up a formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for the plexiglass. Even with the formula, it would take that plant years and years to be reconfigured to produce transparent aluminum, and they say so in the movie.

So... yes. Grandparent is right; they traded the formula for the plexiglass.

You make that joke, but I started thinking about my reef tank as soon as I read this article. When you go over 36" tall you have to use 5/8-3/4 inch low iron (so your fish and corals are not green) glass. If this is really that much stronger, larget tanks could be made cheaper, becuase the glass could be thinner. I wonder what the optical and strength properties really are? Anyone have more information on the testing?

Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a "flame-spray" technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides (A Rosenflanz et al. 2004 Nature 430 761).

Glass is formed when a molten material is cooled so quickly that its constituent atoms do not have time to align themselves into an ordered lattice. However, it is difficult to make glasses from most materials because they need to be cooled -- or quenched -- at rates of up to 10 million degrees per second.

Silica is widely used in glass-making because the quenching rates are much lower, but researchers would like to make glass from alumina as well because of its superior mechanical and optical properties. Alumina can form glass if it is alloyed with calcium or rare-earth oxides, but the required quenching rate can be as high as 1000 degrees per second, which makes it difficult to produce bulk quantities.

Rosenflanz and colleagues started by mixing around 80 mole % of powdered alumina with various rare-earth oxide powders -- including lanthanum, gadolinium and yttrium oxides. Next, they fed the powders into a high-temperature hydrogen-oxygen flame to produce molten particles that were then quenched in water. The resulting glass beads, which were less than 140 microns across, were then heat-treated -- or sintered -- at around 1000C. This produced bulk glass samples in which nanocrystalline alumina-rich phases were dispersed throughout a glassy matrix. The new method avoids the need to apply pressures of 1 gigapascal or more, as is required in existing techniques.

Click to enlargeAluminate glasses

The 3M scientists characterised the glasses using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and thermal analysis, and tested the strength of the materials with hardness and fracture toughness tests. They found that their samples were much harder than conventional silica-based glasses and were almost as hard as pure polycrystalline alumina.

Moreover, over 95% of the glasses were transparent (see figure) and had attractive optical properties. For example, fully crystallized alumina-rare earth oxide ceramics showed high refractive indices if the grains were kept below a certain size.

This news should not be surprising to anyone, since it's essentially a dupe! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/2 0/0358206&tid=126&tid=14 [slashdot.org]

The amusing thing, is that American scientists are given credit here, but if you look at the original article from 2+1/2 years ago, it was the Germans who discovered it. Hmmm...

You could argue that this article is just a 'refinement' of the previous article. I could believe that only if a link had been provided to the original article. Ah well... Odd that the article itself doesn't mention previous work by the Germans either...

I am beginning to suspect that the whole idea of sci-fi is in fact a future society time-travelling back every now and then to make a new 'Star Trek' film to nudge society onto a slightly different path:-)

The number of Star-Trek-driven ideas that have become reality is astounding -

phasers. We have wireless tasers that use a laser to ionise the air then an electric current jumps towards the victim from a battery. The battery is currently an issue)

communicators - hell mobile phones are far better than communicators

voice recognition - lots available these days

transporters - well we've done with an entangled photon. One down, seventeen quadrillion to go. Hey, it's a start!

now, transparent aluminium.. someone's having a laugh!

Ok, we're missing the big one, warp drive, but apparently we have to have a war that more or less wipes out humanity first, so I'll be happy to give it a miss in my lifetime...

OK, I am not sure how Star Trek warp drives are supposed to work, but I remember a RPC circa 1990 called Traveller 2300 had something called "stutterwarp". The idea was this, take a starship and do the transporter trick to jump a few meters, or a couple of kilometers. Now do this at a few Mhz and you have near lightspeed with very little velocity.

They work by literally warping the spacetime around the vessel. This decreases the apparent distance the ship has to travel. Theoretically, warp drives are possible but if Hawking hasn't invented them yet I don't think we're going to see any for a while.

See, that's the kind of shit you learn reading Slashdot. I'm going to go shoot myself for being a massive fucking dork now.

I can't remember where i read about it, but it must've been here.. there are actually IP Phones made by one company that are wearable. Their primary market is hospitals. Ah yes, a quick google found me the product link [cerner.com].

"actually, communicators are more like radio communication... you don't dial any number..."

Why more like radio?

My email is smart enough that if I start typing the first 2 or 3 letters of an email, it can guess at who I want to send it to and be accurate most of the time. I don't need to know the email addresses of anyone involved these days unless I don't have them in my address book which is sync'd between my phone, 2 PCs and 3 Macs. All work about the same.

So you don't dial a number, but you do say "Sulu, Can We Get A Fix On..." and the internal processing realizes that since he didn't refer to a specific Sulu, he must mean the default one and routes it appropriately.

My Cell is smart enough that if I hold a button on the side and say the name it can dial about a dozen numbers. Battery life and processing speeds preclude it from listening all the time.

So, are you saying that because our technology isn't very sufficient today, theirs too must be as unadvanced. I've seen attainable advancements in 10 years that make 20 years ago look like the stone ages. In another 10 years, maybe we will just speak into a phone, and it will wait until it figures out who we are talking too and route accordingly. Who knows. Maybe we will all be back to fighting wars with sticks and stones.

Well, alumina has almost none of the same properties as aluminium (since you're from the UK too, I'll spell that word correctly from now on). It's extremely tough (used in drilling bits), non-conductive and non-reactive. One would expect something described as "Transparent Aluminium" to behave a bit like Aluminium. Alumina doesn't.

Pure aluminum is a metal. Aluminum oxide is not - it's like the difference between hydrogen and water.

As I understand it, pure metals can't be transparent because light is an electromagnetic wave which gets "short-circuited" by conductive materials. Presumably the oxides disrupt this conductivity. And anyway, the alumina is combined with other oxides before being used to form glass.

As I understand it, pure metals can't be transparent because light is an electromagnetic wave which gets "short-circuited" by conductive materials. Presumably the oxides disrupt this conductivity. And anyway, the alumina is combined with other oxides before being used to form glass.

Sort of....

A better way of explaining it would be that for a photon to be absorbed by an electron, there must be an empty higher energy state for the electron to move to (E = Eo + hv, where Eo is the energy state of the electron and hv is the energy of the photon). In solids with metallic bonding, there are many electrons floating around and many free electronic states for them to move to, so any photon that enters the solid can be absorbed by an electron that will then jump to a higher energy state (which will be free, because there are so many free energy states).

In the case of insulating and semiconducting materials, there is a gap in the energy states, so some transitions are not allowed. For pure, single crystal Al2O3, (aka white sapphire), there are (essentially) no transitions available that correspond to the energy of photons of visible light. If you start substituting in Cr3+ ions for the Al3+ ions, your sapphire will turn red and we call it "ruby". In this case, the Cr impurities provide transitions that can absorb wide ranges of visible light, but not red light. What is more is (if this is fairly pure), the ruby will not only absorb light of other wavelengths, but it will emit red light as well. Try putting a synthetic ruby under a UV light, it will glow red.

However, it should be noted that other defects can scatter and absorb light as well. Grain boundaries, voids, inclusions, etc. will affect your light transmittance. It has been possible for some time now to make polycrystalline alumina that is translucent (Lucalox), but polycrystalline alumina can never be transparant, so there are two ways to make alumina transparant: make it single crystal (only one grain, so no grain boundaries) or amorphous (no grain boundaries, because there is no long range crystal order).

I remember seeing a demonstration on conductive polymers, and I immediately took notice of the fact that they had a metallic sheen to them. The same properties that lead to conduction also lead to the reflective properties of metal.

If you just want something transparent that is very durable, you can use something like this alumina technology, or even something crazy like panes of diamond glass or something like that (I'm not sure how strong diamond glass would be, but I'm guessing pretty strong).

On the other hand, a true transparent metal would have lots of desirable properties that none of these materials have. Metals are malleable and ductile, conduct heat well, can withstand stress by deforming, and conduct electricity. All of these properties have to do with the metallic bonds between metal atoms, and consequently they are incompatible with being transparent. That isn't to say that you can't make a nonmetallic material that can transfer heat, or which can bend - but it wouldn't be by the same mechamism as how a metal works.

I always loved metallic bonds simply because they are such an elegant demonstration of how a microscopic property such as chemical bonding leads to macroscopic properties like conductivity and malleability.

For those who want to know more, almost any general chemistry textbook will have a short section on metallic bonding which describes how they work and why they lead to these properties.

No, it makes the term "transparent alumina" valid. The term 'Aluminum' refers to an element, whereas alumina refers to a compound of aluminum. If you refer to the properties of aluminum (or aluminium, if it makes this easier for you), you are (or at least will be understood by others to be) referring to the properties of a quantity of essentially pure aluminum, which is transparent under no condition.

Yeah, and that reminds me, there's this horrific new danger-chemical being given to children, it's made from hydrogen, the most flammable gas in existence, and oxygen, the pure essense of burning, I mean the safety implications are enormous! stop DHMO now!

Certainly. Sapphire is a crystal form of aluminum oxide and it is quite transparent. For example it doesn't absorb ultraviolet photons close to the visible spectrum which make it a suitable material to have in the windows to my vacuum chamber when I want to shoot UV laser light in to it.

A common misconception caused by the old "spun" method of making glass which makes sheets which are thicker at the bottom than the top. People have often assumed that old glass has "flowed" into that shape. It hasn't: it was made that way. Glass does not in fact flow, not even slowly.

Search on Google for "glass flow" for lots and lots of stuff about this.

There is some debate, the scientific consensus at the moment is that (ordinary) glass is NOT a liquid. Wikipedia has some
interesting background [wikipedia.org] info on this discussion.

In general, the composition of glass makes a huge different in properties such as hardness, inertness, transparancy and color. In ordinary glass, CaO is added to lower solubility in water and various other solvents.

One of the great things about sci-fi as a thematic backdrop (be it literature or movies/tv) is that it alone of all the genres has the possibility of inspiring a tangible effect upon the real world.

I remember an interview with James Doohan where he said his greatest pride that came from his career was that he inspired other people to pursue careers where they could make a difference to the world. How many engineers became engineers or went into sciences because of Star Trek?

I'm familiar with the Arthur C Clarke suggesting satellites; I doubt a similar cause/effect with Star Trek IV happened here. However, the similarities are cool, and at least with this genre there is the POSSIBILITY of changing the world for the better.

PS Fortunately such transitions from sci-fi fantasy to real world are few and far between. 90%+ of tv SF and pulp SF is dreck, and I myself and not looking forward to a Brave New World...

A recent example is the Alcubierre warp drive. A general relativist took a break from computing the gravity fields of real objects to ask himself whether there was any way to create a field with the property of allowing faster-than-light travel.

Heinlein gave another example when he testified to Congress about space program funding. He got his stroke surgery from a surgeon who excelled at having patients survive. The surgeon did so well because h

Is nothing new - it's called corundum [about.com] or as you more probably know it, sapphire (or ruby when it is red).

And hard is only one part of the story. Glass is hard, yet I wouldn't want to make structural elements of an aircraft from large hunks of glass... Aluminum is light and Tough (high energy to break). It is also ductile (deforms before breaking) something that no ceramic is...

So, while this is cool, and will probably be used for super scratch proof layers on spyplane camera transparencies or something like that where they can afford something like this, it isn't what you think it is.

As an aside, translucent alumina is used in something you see everyday - sodium vapor lamps use alumina to encapsulate the sodium metal that they use as their filament.

NO IT ISN'T! Commercially developed transparent Alumina (think clear ruby/sapphire) is here, HUGE difference. Sorry Trek fans, you will have to wait longer. There will be no clear planes, no clear cases made of Alumina. If cases were transparent Alumina then they would have the same properties as silica glass and you would have a nice greenhouse effect going on slowly (or not so slowly) frying your computer.

Similarly, when the grain size is maintained below the scattering limit, the fully crystallized Al[2]O[3] REO ceramics exhibit attractive optical characteristics including high refractive index (1.8 and higher) and transparency through the mid-infrared range.

If you have a high quality watch it is likely that the crystal is made from polycrystalline alumina (i.e. corundum...in this case synthetic corundum). The alumina glass is different however in the fact that it is a glass and therefore lacks crystal structure.

Since it doesn't have to be crystallized it is likely that it will be able to be produced in large sizes. However, being a glass it is not going to have the malleable properties of aluminum metal and will probably shatter if hit hard enough.

I once knew a guy who had this great idea to use aluminum oxide on DVDs and CDs to prevent scratching. He said the disks could be bulletproof, scratchproof, and unbreakable, although I think he was exagerating...

If that was the case, that would be an AWESOME application for this. Although the MP/RIAA would see that as a reason for preventing backup copies of your media. I mean, if the disk can't be damaged, why would you need a backup? Although you could still lose it or have it stolen...

I once knew a guy who had this great idea to use aluminum oxide on DVDs and CDs to prevent scratching. He said the disks could be bulletproof, scratchproof, and unbreakable, although I think he was exagerating...

I could just imagine the crime scene:

Police Officer: Can you describe the person who attempted to raid the bank?

Witness #1: Yes, he was covered in head to toe with CD's glued to his clothes.

Police Officer: Can you give me any further details?

Witness #1: I think the CD's had words on them "AOL trial account - 14 days free service".

I read some comprehensive article on "transparent concrete", probably the NY Times Sunday Magazine, but cant locate the reference. There are several related articles on Google. Concrete is seeing a resurgence as a decorative material, i.e. wall and floor coverings. Theres many ways to modify it to have more attractive decorative properties if you willing to sacrifice some structural strength. Concrete is inexpensive and easy to manipulate.

A more accurate term is translucent concrete. One guy embeds perpendicular optical fibers so some external sunlight gets through. There are other techniques too.

It has similar optical properties, but probably not similar mechanical properties. It's Alumina first off, which is a ceramic I believe, but thinking of the way it's formed, you can see where it would have similar properties to current glass.

Take a metal, and cool it off very rapidly, and it becomes very hard but also very brittle. Cool if off fast enough apparantly, before the atoms have a chance to properly align themselves, and it becomes transparent, which is what happens with Silica to make glass. They just found a way to cool off Alumina fast enough. Problem is, what gives metal its characteristics are the very nice, orderly arrangement of atoms bonded in sheets, so that it can remain strong while also bending before breaking.

I don't think this is anything other than a cool way to make glass out of something else, perhaps something stronger, but nowhere near as cool as a material resulting in clear body panels on a car, or clear coke cans.

You are falling for the assumption that transarent alumina compounds are, in fact, transparent aluminum metal. Lots of gemstones are transparent alumina compounds, too. Rubies, emeralds, etc. They do not bend.

I am not a chemist, but I believe the condition of the material to allow shifting of bonds that allows metals to bend without breaking is nearly the opposite of the condition present in glass. Ie, alumina glass may be stronger, but it will not bend.